TITLE: "King of the Hill" NAME: Glenn McCarter COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: gmccarter@hotmail.com WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/2006/ TOPIC: Nature COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: dominion.jpg ZIPFILE: dominion.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.0 TOOLS USED: sPatch (bezier patch creation) Moray (bezier patch creation, small CSGs) Paint Shop Pro (heightfields; convert image to JPEG) RENDER MUSIC: Paul Simon "Graceland" RENDER TIME: 18h 43m HARDWARE USED: Pentium 90mhz IMAGE DESCRIPTION: And Brutus Proclaimed Unto The Others: "Lo, I am King of all I survey. Behold my Dominion! Kneel down before Me, and Ye may be spared my Mighty wrath!" And Leviticus Thought To Himself: "Oh give me a break, wiseguy." DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Rather than explain all the technical details, allow me to describe the creative process for this image. I tossed around a dozen ideas for "Nature", ranging from marlin fishing to an ant colony. One of the ideas involved a watering hole: an oasis. I pictured a closeup view of an elephant or large cat drinking at the water's edge. But I immediately ran into a problem with this: a closeup view looking downwards at the water couldn't possibly capture the full animal. I hit upon a clever solution: just show the tip of the elephant's trunk slurping up water. The rest of the elephant would only be visible as reflections in the water. The rest of the scene would then show surrounding details: small plants, rocks, and a few bugs or birds. Then I thought of adding a lizard or salamander. The lizard would be sitting on a rock, watching the elephant drink. I liked this, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the lizard itself, not the elephant, would be the focal point of the scene. The elephant became redundant, unnecesary. Can you see the final image developing? To include a more interesting background, I tilted the camera upwards in my mind's eye. I added a hillside, and changed the static water into a running stream. This allowed me to give the scene a foreground, middle, and background, as well as to keep the scene lively with chaotic diagonal lines instead of horizontal/vertical. Finally, I added lots of overhead vegetation, creating interesting shadows but keeping the lizard in sunlight. The accompanying story became self evident. This process took about three weeks. The next month was spent modelling and rendering. -- Ok, a few technical details: almost the entire scene is made with height fields and bezier patches. Because of the huge memory requirements of this scene, it was rendered as three layers: the background, which was then used as an image map in the main scene, which was then used as an image map for the foreground rendering. The rendering time shown above is for the main scene. For a complete description of the technical details, see the file readme.txt in the zipfile.